Reflection:This Field Experience Log and Reflection details the work I completed for my coaching journal, which was an assignment for my ITEC 7460 Professional Learning and Technology Innovation course taken spring semester 2015. This log includes activities related to completing the field experience, time spent on each activity, state and national standards addressed, in addition to a reflection about the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of a technology facilitator and the impact of this experience on school improvement, faculty development, and student learning. Throughout my program, I engaged in field experiences to synthesize and apply the content and professional knowledge, skills, and disposition identified in the Georgia Professional Standards Commission Instructional Technology Standards and the ISTE Standards for Coaches. My coaching journal is one such field experience. Through this assignment, I coached a peer in implementing a new technology tool in her classroom. I documented the experience through a journal where I noted strategies used in our coaching sessions, skills addressed, affective changes noticed, challenges faced, and solutions offered. This field experience allowed me to synthesize the information we had learned about coaching through the Kansas Coaching Project. This method of coaching focuses on collaborating with teachers to identify teaching practices that are likely to have a positive effect on student learning (Beglau et al., 2011). Through our reading and coursework, we learned about the Instructional Coaching model, which consists of seven practices that are used in instructional coaching: enroll, identify, explain, model, observe, explore, and refine (Beglau et al., 2011). I applied this information when coaching my peer by incorporating the strategies of identifying a tool she wanted to learn, explaining how the tool works and what effective integration looks like in the classroom, modeling the tool in use, observing her using the tool, and exploring other ways she could use the tool in the future. For me, the most impactful part of completing any field experience log was the reflection. This gave me an opportunity to think about what I learned through the field experience and how I could apply that knowledge in the future. This particular field experience gave me firsthand experience being a technology coach. I enjoyed working one-on-one with a colleague and found that listening to her and giving her a voice and choice in what we did made our sessions more effective. They were mutually beneficial in that we both learned new things. If I were to coach a colleague again, I would improve upon this experience by extending our sessions. We met for five sessions, which was necessary due to the length of the semester. However, I think more sessions would have been beneficial if time permitted so we could look at data and engage in more dialogue and feedback about implementing the technology tool.

The work that went into this artifact impacted faculty development. Both my colleague and I gained professional skills and knowledge that we could apply to our classrooms through this experience. Additionally, student learning was impacted through the technology tool implemented in my colleague’s classroom. The impact in these areas can be assessed through classroom observations of technology tools in use, discussions with students about their attitudes toward the new technology tools, conversations with teachers participating in coaching, and our end of year teacher survey about technology use in the classroom.